The Fundamental Value of XRP

Nov 29, 2017 | Team Ripple

Much of the public discussion about digital assets today revolves around price. Companies hope for a pop on an initial offering to raise funds, investors seek to ride an asset for a long-term payday, or consumers try to time market moves for a quick buck. But while this emphasis on price may be appropriate for most assets, it does a disservice to XRP.

The ultimate merit of XRP lies not necessarily in its price, but in its institutional value and use cases. XRP is the only digital asset custom-built for enterprises to facilitate the transfer of value. This aligns with Ripple’s vision to create a global Internet of Value, by acting as a reliable, on-demand option to source liquidity and send cross-border payments.

Ordinarily, a company managing a cross-border payment would send money through traditional accounts that take three to five days to settle. Alternatively, a company can speed up this transaction by pre-funding nostro accounts in the recipient’s country to cover the amounts being transferred. This ties up valuable capital that could be used elsewhere and incurs foreign exchange fees regardless.

XRP is best suited as a liquidity tool

Through Ripple, these same enterprise customers gain access to real-time global payments across 27 countries with end-to-end tracking and certainty. But by using XRP within those transactions, they can earn even greater benefits. XRP enables these companies to source liquidity on demand in real time without having to pay transaction fees or pre-fund nostro accounts.

This is achieved because XRP serves as a bridge currency between fiat currencies, avoiding the time and cost of pre-funding accounts or managing fiat-to-fiat exchanges. Through XRP, banks, payment providers and businesses can supercharge their cross-border payments to expand into new markets, increase payment volume, lower foreign exchange costs, and provide faster settlement times for their customers.

How is this possible? Over a five-year track record, XRP has been proven fast, scalable and stable.

Fast

XRP enables fully settled payments in four seconds. That compares to traditional payment systems that can take three to five days, and even leaves other popular digital assets like Ether (two or more minutes) and Bitcoin (one or more hours) in the dust.

Scalable

XRP can handle 1,500 transactions per second: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. This is 100 times more transactions per second than Ether and more than 250 greater than Bitcoin. XRP can also scale to handle the same transaction throughput as Visa.

Stable

Ripple was established in 2012 and has closed every subsequent ledger over the intervening five years – more than 34 million transactions – successfully without issue. And all of this is done with negligible energy consumption.

What does this mean for the ultimate value of XRP? That it is a long-term play measured not by short-term jumps in price, but rather by enterprise adoption of Ripple and use of XRP.

Today, more than 100 customers and over 75 commercial deployments are part of Ripple’s growing global network. From American Express to Standard Chartered, the use cases continue to expand, and with them, the ultimate potential for XRP.